IGX

Columbia University – Nov 21, 2003

Statement on Walter Duranty's 1932 Prize

After more than six months of study and deliberation, the Pulitzer Prize Board has decided it will not revoke the foreign reporting prize awarded in 1932 to Walter Duranty of The New York Times.

In recent months, much attention has been paid to Mr. Duranty's dispatches regarding the famine in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, which have been criticized as gravely defective. However, a Pulitzer Prize for reporting is awarded not for the author's body of work or for the author's character but for the specific pieces entered in the competition. Therefore, the board focused its attention on the 13 articles that actually won the prize, articles written and published during 1931. [A complete list of the articles, with dates and headlines, is attached.]

In its review of the 13 articles, the Board determined that Mr. Duranty's 1931 work, measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short. In that regard, the Board's view is similar to that of The New York Times itself and of some scholars who have examined his 1931 reports. However, the board concluded that there was not clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception, the relevant standard in this case. Revoking a prize 71 years after it was awarded under different circumstances, when all principals are dead and unable to respond, would be a momentous step and therefore would have to rise to that threshold.

The famine of 1932-1933 was horrific and has not received the international attention it deserves. By its decision, the board in no way wishes to diminish the gravity of that loss. The Board extends its sympathy to Ukrainians and others in the United States and throughout the world who still mourn the suffering and deaths brought on by Josef Stalin.

The appearance in 1981 of a Hollywood movie, Reds, in which the main character is a Communist, the journalist John Reed, and is sympathetically portrayed, was startling. It was one of many pieces of evidence that the nation had moved a critical distance away from the Communist hysteria of the Fifties. The editors of the Boston Globe asked me, as a historian, to tell their readers about John Reed, and this piece appeared January 5, 1982.

Radicals are doubly exasperating. They not only refuse to conform to ideas of what true American patriots are like; they may not even fit common notions of what radicals are like. So with John Reed and Louise Bryant, who confounded and infuriated the guardians of cultural and political orthodoxy around the time of World War I.

With the greatest interest and with never slackening attention I read John Reed's book, Ten Days that Shook the World. Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and most vivid exposition of the events so significant to the comprehension of what really is the Proletarian Revolution and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. These problems are widely discussed, but before one can accept or reject these ideas, he must understand the full significance of his decision. John Reed's book will undoubtedly help to clear this question, which is the fundamental problem of the international labor movement.

V. LENIN.
End of 1919

On March 1, 1999, The New York Times reported[9] New York University's "Top 100 Works of Journalism" list,[note 2] which placed Ten Days that Shook the World at #7.[10] Project director Mitchell Stephens explains the reasoning behind the judges' decision:

Perhaps the most controversial work on our list is the seventh, John Reed's book, "Ten Days That Shook the World," reporting on the October revolution in Russia in 1917. Yes, as conservative critics have noted, Reed was a partisan. Yes, historians would do better. But this was probably the most consequential news story of the century, and Reed was there, and Reed could write. The magnitude of the event being reported on and the quality of the writing were other important standards in our considerations.[11]